Repositories, an alternative to academic journals? › Hybrid Publishing Lab Notepad

Spending my day in four late trains yesterday that were all held captive by the German winter, I managed to read this very good report on 'The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability (2012)' from our colleagues from Göttingen, the Coar Initiative. Repositories are indeed becoming an interesting alternative to the knowledge distribution by academic journals. That is why in August Elsevier, the publisher of 2,000 scientific journals, acquired Atira, the company who developed the full text repository PURE. There is much to be thought about and a lot needs to be debated, though one thing is clear: more and more universities make their researchers file their writings in a repository (indeed, the Hybrid Publishing Lab’s researchers will have a track&trace session with PURE during our next big meeting). So who is interested in Open Access needs to follow this development, and this report gives quite a good overview on Open Access Initiatives dealing with them..."